Your Mileage May Vary

"Your Mileage May Vary", abbreviated on Use Net as YMMV.

Commonly stated as a caveat when the person's experience is subjective and without hard numbers to back up a statement. In use as a flame retardant.

Example of a comment one might make which is so obviously wrong and provocative that a war would surely ensue if it weren't for the YMMV caveat: I find EMACS to be a much more effective editor than vi, but YMMV.

On Wiki, the preferred form of this phrase is its Wiki Word or unwikified at all, not its acronym. See Acronyms On The Wiki.

Discussion

An American Cultural Assumption. In the U.S., motor vehicles are sold with statements of gasoline consumption in miles per gallon (mileage). The standard advertising disclaimer warning that the buyer's experience may not match the published numbers is 'Your mileage may vary'. -- Robert Field (pointing out the possibly obvious again)

"Nautical Miles" are used and understood in nearly the entire world.

Yes, and they are 15% longer than statute miles. Another reason Your Mileage May Vary.

But still a good counter to the claim that YMMV embeds an American Cultural Assumption.

The cultural assumption is that everyone in the world sees and hears the phrase all the time. -- Robert Field

[Implicit in the expression is also the American Cultural Experience that the American car manufacturers intentionally and deliberately manipulated both the labeling requirements and the measuring technology so that the posted mileages were virtually meaningless - "Your mileage may vary" was the Weasel Wording that protected the manufacturers from consumer protection lawsuits. Thus, Your Mileage May Vary, as used on the net, is often very apropos to benchmarks that sound great and have only coincidental relationship to actual performance. Has anybody invented a "Nautical Kilometer" yet? -- Tom Stambaugh]

The kilometer was meant to be the "Nautical Kilometer". The Nautical Mile was meant to be 1/5400 of the distance from the equator to the poles (or 1 Nautical mile = 1 minute latitude.) Similarly, the kilometer was meant to be 1/10,000 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole (at the longitude of Paris). Of course, the measurement errors 200 years ago were substantial, so the current definitions are different.

Oddly enough, the proportions are the same:

This discrepancy is much less than the error in the distance from the equator to the North Pole. (And yes, the commas in the numbers are an American Cultural Assumption.)

Let's test whether this embeds an American Cultural Assumption.

Find a non-American who hasn't yet been exposed to this discussion, and ask them what they think of when they see YMMV in print. Check first for whether they understand the acronym. If they don't, tell them "Your Mileage May Vary", and ask them whether they know what the expression means. Then ask whether they think of the term as an Americanism.

Is this a fair test? If not, what is? If so, go try it now.

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In Europe (at least the German-speaking countries), you specify how many liters of gas you use per 100km, not how many km you can drive with one liter. So it would be "your literage may vary" (yuck).

I confirm the American Cultural Assumption: Since we in Europe count the consumption per 100km, the expression is not understood before the explanation of the cultural difference. We have a European directive on how to calculate the consumption that must be expressed in commercials for cars (CEE 93/116) based on tests simulating driving in a city and on motorways. This implies that, outside the strict conditions of these tests, our consumption may vary. www.environment.fgov.be

Only some of Europe. Denmark uses kilometers per liter.

And Britain does the same, only in real units: miles per gallon - but remember that the gallon in the UK (and Australia) is larger than the gallon in the USA.

Jah, and even in Europe, there are differences, which aren't always known by other Europeans. In Sweden, for example, we calculate consumption by Swedish mile, thus effectively expressing it as (fractional) litres per 10 km - a decent town car these days might be said to have an average consumption 0.49l (implicit per 10km mixed driving). The Swedish decimal comma is replaced here by the English decimal point, of course.

I think most English-fluent people get the gist of YMMV from a more abstracted sense of "how far you get/go" from stated premises.

Okay, I agree that it's an American Cultural Assumption to use mileage, but I still think the point gets across - I'm an Aussie (we use the metric system in case you hadn't guessed) but I had no difficulty in understanding what the phrase meant - which is all that is required... besides most ex-European-colonies used to use imperial measurements so it's not like we're all completely unfamiliar with what mileage means. The phrase serves its purpose even if it isn't the exact standard of measurement in current use in the country you happen to make your residence. -- Just Mab

From a British perspective, using miles, and thinking in gallons (although it is not legal to buy petrol that way), the units are familiar, but the usage unfamiliar (though unsurprising). -- Garbled

The phrase gets its meaning and resonance from something specific to the United States. -- Robert Field

Which is a good argument for using It Depends instead. It Depends on whether you are driving a Morris Minor or a Ford Expedition. The distance you travel on a given volume of fuel varies. It Depends will also avoid the seemingly endless comparison of Cultural and Usage terminology. It seems some never Get Over It or just plainly do not want to Get Over It. Take it as a given that on the first wiki, (West Coast USA) Portland Oregon, (over 4900 miles from London England

wiki.answers.com that American expressions will be generated. (...)

The problem with It Depends is exactly that it lacks the resonance that made Your Mileage May Vary a popular phrase. Using "It Depends" would thus be a bowdlerization, not an addition to clarity. Surely those unfamiliar with the American Cultural Assumption can pick up the meaning fairly quickly, just like Americans have to learn that Brits call the BBC the Beeb before they can understand British media coverage.

"Beeb" has previously been used by the BBC to describe their commercial wing, now called "BBC Worldwide Limited". The Beeb sells DVDs, books, and magazines. It is a legally separate entity, since "the BBC" proper isn't allowed to profit from commercial enterprise. The BBC is almost always called "the BBC" in formal media coverage. Informally, it may also be known as Auntie. -- A Briton

Category Idiom, Jargon File

See original on c2.com